French news API
Query Français coverage by keyword, meaning or both. Written in Latin . Pass fra as the language filter.
What the coverage looks like
French coverage spans Europe, North and West Africa, and Canada, with newsrooms whose editorial traditions differ more than the shared language suggests. Coverage of African affairs in French is substantially deeper than anything available in English, and is frequently the only detailed reporting that exists.
| Articles observed | 2.4k |
|---|---|
| Distinct outlets | 303 |
| Articles per outlet | 8 |
| ISO-639-3 code | fra |
| Script | Latin |
Outlet spread is the number worth watching here, not volume. 303 distinct publishers at roughly 8 articles each describes a very different information environment than the same total produced by a handful of prolific sources — and it is the difference between reaching independent reporting and reading one newsroom repeatedly.
In this sample the most active publisher is sudouest.fr, carrying
about 5% of French articles on its own, and the three busiest
— sudouest.fr, ladepeche.fr, maville.com — account for roughly 10% between
them. That is a comparatively flat distribution, which means volume here translates fairly directly into independent reporting rather than one newsroom publishing repeatedly.
Script and matching behaviour
Inflected, with extensive elision and contraction that fuses short words onto the following one. Accents are inconsistently applied in headlines and are frequently dropped in URLs and slugs, so the same proper noun appears in several spellings across a single day.
How to query it
Use semantic mode and, where geography matters, constrain by outlet — a query about the franc CFA reaches very different reporting from Paris and from Dakar. Both are legitimate; they are rarely both what you wanted.
Bound every request with a time range regardless of mode. Meaning-based retrieval always returns its best guesses, so an unbounded query produces a confident-looking result set anchored to nothing in particular. If results feed a model rather than a person, collapse to stories as well — one event covered by thirty outlets should cost you one item, not thirty.
Recent headlines in Français
Pulled from the index on 2026-07-31, shown in their original script so you can see what the API actually returns rather than a translated approximation of it.
Outlets publishing in French
The most active publishers in this language, by article count. Use these as an outlet filter when you want to pin a particular market or editorial position rather than taking the whole language.
sudouest.fr · ladepeche.fr · maville.com · ici.fr · lalibre.be · allafrica.com · franceinfo.fr · bfmtv.com · midilibre.fr · laprovence.com · republicain-lorrain.fr · radiofrance.fr
What catches people out
Elision is the mechanical trap and geography is the analytical one. A query built from a dictionary form misses the contracted variants that dominate headline style, and a query with no outlet constraint silently blends Parisian, Québécois and West African reporting into a single feed. Those newsrooms are covering different events with different assumptions, and the resulting stream reads as incoherent without it being obvious why.
A worked case
For African economic coverage, filter to French and scope to outlets published on the continent. Doing this reliably surfaces detailed reporting that has no English-language equivalent at all — not a thinner version, no version. It is one of the clearest cases in the index where querying a language directly rather than waiting for translated coverage changes what you are able to know.
Where this language leads
Strongest on European institutions, African politics and economics, and cultural coverage. Technology reporting is present but tends to follow English-language sources rather than lead them.
Who queries it, and why
Queried for European institutional coverage and, increasingly, for African affairs where it is the primary rather than the secondary source. Teams building for francophone Africa consistently underestimate how much is available here and how little of it has an English equivalent.
Reading these numbers
These figures are provisional. They are measured from the public source the index is built from rather than from the index itself, because the query endpoint is not yet reachable from the build. They are the right order of magnitude and the outlets and headlines are real, but they should not be quoted as coverage guarantees until a snapshot taken against the API replaces them.
A page exists for this language because the index carries enough French coverage from enough distinct outlets to answer a real question about it. Languages that do not clear that bar deliberately have no page rather than a page that implies coverage which is not there.